Singapore Sars Case Traced To Lab Samples

September 24, 2003|By Lawrence K. Altman The New York Times

A World Health Organization committee of experts in virology and occupational safety has concluded that a Singaporean researcher who developed SARS last month most likely became infected through contamination in a laboratory in which he worked, Singapore health officials said on Tuesday.

The researcher, a 27-year-old doctoral student, is in quarantine at home. He was discharged from a hospital last week after being treated for mild SARS.

The researcher worked in a laboratory that Singapore had created to study the West Nile virus and other diseases before SARS became epidemic earlier this year. The laboratory grew the SARS virus to provide materials for developing diagnostic tests.

No secondary cases have been found, leading the health organization to say that the case is not an international public health concern.

Because the Singapore government and the health organization's officials are deeply concerned about the possibility of SARS accidentally escaping from a laboratory, Singapore asked the health organization, a Geneva-based U.N. agency, to send an expert committee to investigate the circumstances of the researcher's case.

In a report released by the Singapore Ministry of Health on Tuesday, the 11-member committee said that "inappropriate laboratory standards and a cross-contamination of West Nile virus samples with SARS coronavirus in the laboratory led to the infection of the doctoral student."

The committee, led by Dr. Antony Della-Porta, an Australian biosafety expert, made a number of recommendations to improve the safety of the laboratory where the contamination occurred, including saying all virus samples in the laboratory at the time SARS virus was present should be destroyed. The panel also proposed improving training and fumigating the laboratory.

Singaporean officials said that the laboratory would be closed until it addressed all the committee's recommendations.